by Tim Curran
He knew it as McKenna knew it and Cave knew it.
McKenna had spent three years in Afghanistan with MARSOC and four more with Blackpool as a private operator. Cave was a twenty-five year veteran of Army Special Forces, raising hell everywhere from Africa to Central America. And since, with the Company, he’d seen more human wreckage and destruction save anyone but God himself.
But this... this was insanity.
This was beyond death.
The bed was a bog of blood and noxious slime and mucus. They originally thought there was one body, but then they saw two. Two women, bloated and naked, wet with a yellowish jelly. They were connected at the mouth by something that looked very much like a huge, pale segmented worm. As it convulsed, their bodies rose up, expanding as if they were filled with gas, limbs trembling and eyes rolling like mad marbles…and the worm itself—if worm it was—grew pink and swollen as if it were drawing blood from its hosts with slow deliberate sips.
Tingling waves went up and down Stein’s spine, spreading out over his forearms. Alive, he thought. Those people are alive.
And by the looks of unparalleled horror in their eyes, they were not only alive but aware of what was happening to them, what had burrowed deep inside them.
“Oh shit, oh shit,” McKenna whimpered.
“Keep back, gentlemen,” Cave said, his normal baritone gone to a shrill, dry scraping. “Don’t get any closer.”
Neither man had any intention of doing that.
Cave whipped out an encrypted secure cell with a trembling hand. He nearly dropped it. His breath coming in short, sharp gasps, he punched in a number very quickly. “Get that team up here for fuck’s sake... we got a couple live ones! You hear me? I need a BCT stat! We got fucking adult forms in this room…”
Stein just kept staring.
There were some things in life you just couldn’t look away from. And the worm was one of them. It just kept doing its thing, expanding and deflating with an absolutely horrid rubbery squeaking sound like an over-inflated balloon. As if air was being pumped into it, then bled off. But it wasn’t air, of course, it was blood. The thing was about as big around as a man’s forearm, but each time it deflated it went nearly flat like the peel of onion. Each segment had little glistening hooks set on either side.
The woman on the left opened her eyes completely and looked at them, gagging and gasping as the worm moved in her throat. Neither Cave, McKenna, or Stein had ever seen anything so absolutely repulsive. Or pathetic, for they could see she wanted help.
“Jesus fucking Christ, she’s alive,” McKenna blubbered. “She’s alive! She’s fucking alive!”
“Knock it off,” Cave said. “There’s nothing we can do for her.”
“We can put her out of her misery,” Stein suggested.
“No firing,” Cave said, “unless we have to.”
McKenna didn’t see it that way, though.
Something had been boiling in him for days and this... this obscenity was just about what it took to set it free.
“Fuck that,” he said.
He started shooting on full auto. Stein followed suit. Before Cave could do a damn thing to intercede, bullets were slamming into the parasite and the two bodies it fed off of. Blood and flesh and worm-matter splattered against the walls. It didn’t take very long. Within what seemed seconds both men had emptied their clips.
“GODDAMMIT!” Cave shrieked. “WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST SAY?”
McKenna and Stein didn’t really care what he’d just said or what he was saying now. Mechanically, they ejected the old magazines and inserted fresh ones.
But Cave got in front of them. “No,” he said. “Either of you start shooting and I grease both of you.” He had his Steyr nine-millimeter pointed at McKenna’s face. The big, barrel-like silencer was inches from the man’s nose. “Swear to God,” he murmured.
And then behind him… a sound.
The bodies on the bed were so full of holes they reminded Stein of death photos of Bonnie and Clyde he’d once seen. They were bulging and jutting, the skin stretched taut in some places, sagging in others. Like maybe bones and organs and tissues had ruptured inside, exploding beneath the flesh. But they were dead, they could feel no pain.
But the worm... it wasn’t dead.
Punched with bullet holes, it was very much alive.
It slithered out of the woman on the right, sliding free of her mouth with a wet, slippery sound, segment by hideous segment, a good three feet of it if not four. Its flesh was a bleached, glistening white, nearly translucent where the segments joined. A white like bacon lard. When it was free of its host, the corpse slid off the bed, a tangled loose-limbed torso that hit the floor with a meaty, sprawling thud, jaws springing open with the impact and a slush of black fluid draining into the carpet.
“Where the hell are they?” Cave asked in an airless voice. “Where the fuck is that containment team?”
Slowly, he backed up, forcing Stein and McKenna back with him.
The worm squirmed on the bed sluggishly, twisting and writhing, seeming to pulsate thickly as if it were breathing. Then, straight as an arrow, it shot up into the air, its hooks digging into the stucco ceiling. It pulled the other woman up with it. She hung there momentarily like a corpse-puppet, swaying back and forth with the motion of the worm, then its posterior end slid from her mouth and she dropped to the bed.
It dangled from the ceiling like an inchworm from a milkweed leaf, moving with a slick serpentine motion. It was eyeless, featureless save for an X-shaped slit at its bulbous snout. As they watched, mesmerized by the sheer malignant beauty of the thing, the slit opened up, the flesh seeming to retract from it. There were four undulating snakelike things that might have been tongues, wriggling like night crawlers on a hook.
“WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT TEAM?” Cave shouted.
The worm let out a perfectly hideous mewling sound and that was pretty much all it took. Stein and McKenna snapped. They knocked Cave out of the way and drew their guns. It was either that or run. Inaction was impossible; you couldn’t let a thing like that live.
They started shooting and as the first bullets hit it, the worm contracted to half its length and vomited a stream of black bile at Stein. It missed by scant inches, striking the wallpaper in a wet spray.
“Fuck this,” Stein said and kept firing.
The slugs shattered the thing into a million flabby fragments, worm blood and worm tissue splattered everywhere. This time Cave made no attempt to stop them. When they were finished, there was worm meat everywhere…on the walls, dripping in vile gouts from the ceiling. There was a stink of cordite and a sharp, agonizing stench of ammonia. There were shell casings gleaming everywhere.
And eggs…a spreading pool of snotty, glistening eggs.
About that time, the containment team showed up.
8:41 P.M.
Shawna Geddes was parked about half a block away.
She’d followed the van—a white Ford Econoline with HAPPY VALLEY MEATS stenciled on the side—from Portage Park to what looked like an old disused warehouse in one of the River North neighborhoods in the Furniture District. The place was enclosed by a chain-link fence with dogs and a couple guys with crewcuts watching the gate. They admitted the van, then quickly locked the gate with chains and padlocks. She drove by the place twice, but saw nothing. No signs or indications of any sort as to what was going on there.
But she knew one thing.
Whatever was going on at that place wasn’t good, wasn’t normal. HAPPY VALLEY MEATS or not, it sure as hell wasn’t a meat processing plant. And if it was, the security was awfully tight. On her second pass, she saw that there were men walking the fence all over the place. And what did that imply?
She’d heard that some of these old warehouses were sometimes used by the Chicago Outfit for whacking enemies and disposing of the remains. As chop shops for stripping and repainting stolen vehicles. Or even as factories to process heroin and cocaine. If that was the case,
then she wasn’t too sure if she wanted to look into this any deeper.
She parked at a convenience store about a block away and just kept watch.
The minutes turned to hours. She dozed off more than once. Then, around 7:30, the van took off again. It went on a long drive and she followed at a very discreet distance, sometimes with her lights off. The van went south on 94, out of the city and across the Indiana border into the tri-city area of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago. Finally, settling on the latter, it went to an apartment complex over in Marktown at Prospect Street and Pine where they had all those historical buildings, the white stucco rowhouses that looked like they’d been plucked from Victorian slums.
And that’s where she was now, waiting and waiting, and not really even knowing why she was doing any of this. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was diversion. But, deep inside, she knew it was something more.
Curiosity.
Maybe this is none of your business, she kept telling herself. Maybe this is Mob business. Something to do with drugs or a turf war or something equally unpleasant. If that’s the case, Shawna, they won’t appreciate you nosing around.
Yet... yet something told her it wasn’t that simple.
Using her little binoculars from the glove compartment (the previous owner had left them and she’d never found a use for them—until now), she tried to keep an eye on what was going down at the apartment house. But it was no easy trick; it was too damn dark out. The front of the building was illuminated well enough, but the streets were murky. She saw three men go into the building, but nothing more. She couldn’t really tell if they were the same guys from the park or not.
There was nothing more to do but get in closer.
On foot, she slipped up the opposite side of the street until she found a darkened house nearly across from the building. Squatting behind a row of wild rose bushes, she kept watch.
About a minute after she got there another van pulled up.
It was also stenciled with the same logo, but it was much larger with a humming refrigeration unit hanging over the cab. That fit in with the meat thing, but still it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense when you came right down to it.
Oh shit… oh shit… what is this all about?
With a shaking hand, she took out her iPhone and zoomed on the vans, videoing them. Sneaking forward carefully, ducking behind parked cars, then trees and shrubs, she got in close enough to get some good shots.
Three more men dressed in what looked like white rubber suits hopped out of the back of the refrigerated van. They carried matching hoods with glass face masks. They also carried—and very carefully—silver tanks with sprayer attachments. Like the sort exterminators might have. Quickly, they went in. She kept the video rolling, getting as much as she could. Two other men hopped out of the cab of the other van and just stood there, scanning the street and nearby houses.
Like a security detail.
Shawna was scared shitless by that point.
This entire thing was weird beyond weird. Whatever HAPPY VALLEY MEATS was a cover for, it had to be real bad news.
The big question, of course, was: Why the hell wasn’t anybody noticing any of this? It was low-key, yes, but it was still damned weird. Somebody had to notice guys in white radiation suits, you’d think.
Somewhere in these tightly-pressed blocks of houses there had to be at least one grumpy old man or crotchety old lady with nothing better to do than stare out their windows. People like that called the cops every time a car backfired for chrissake.
But not now?
Shawna began to get very suspicious when five, then ten, and finally fifteen minutes passed and the police did not show. It was unnerving and somewhat creepy.
What if you called them and they didn’t come because they weren’t SUPPOSED to come?
Paranoia. She had to take it down a notch.
With those guys watching the street, she didn’t dare move. She crouched in the bushes until her feet and calves were numb, her face beaded with sweat. Once she tipped forward and grabbed a rose stem for support. The thorns sank into her thumb and forefinger. She wanted very badly to cry out, but didn’t dare. She chewed her lip and waited, stock still.
What the fuck have you gotten yourself into now? a little pissed-off voice in her head asked. Isn’t it enough to ruin marriages and lose jobs, now you have to lose your life as well?
But maybe she was being paranoid.
Maybe there was a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, though she seriously doubted it. Call it woman’s intuition or journalistic instinct, but something was really rotten here. Rotten and deadly and bizarre and it stank like shit. Something that was apparently above and beyond the law.
And Shawna Geddes was stuck right in the middle.
And for the time being, that’s exactly where she was staying.
9:03 P.M.
After they’d put the worm out of its misery, the hit team climbed back into their van without saying a word. By that time, a BCT had arrived and taken over. The bedroom of Carolyn Argante, deceased, had to be cleaned and sterilized before anyone called it a night. And that included digging bullets from the walls.
We make the mess, McKenna thought, and they vacuum it up.
Cave drove about three blocks and then pulled to the curb, just down from a saloon called Happy Hannigan’s. He dug out his gun and handed it to Stein. “All weapons in the bag.”
They each put their handguns and remaining magazines in a plastic bag for disposal. They had been used and were now traceable. They had to be destroyed.
When Stein zipped the bag shut, he said, “Thank God for silencers or we’d have had cops crawling up our ass.”
“The containment team knew,” McKenna said. “They knew exactly what they were coming into.”
Cave lit a cigarette in the darkness, sighing. Finally, he shook his head and said, “Boys, I had no idea—”
“You knew,” McKenna said, his face screwed-up into a sour mask. “You knew all about those... things.”
Cave looked to Stein, but he wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“I had some indication that—”
“Fuck you!” McKenna snapped. “And don’t you dare look at me like that, goddammit! I don’t give a healthy shit how you outrank me or how fucking long you been in! You knew. You fucking knew, boss! You knew what kind of risk we were running and you never warned us.”
“Take it easy,” Cave said, more of a request than an order. “Yeah, I knew some. More than you guys did. But you couldn’t be told. The Old Man wouldn’t allow it. Can’t you see that? The security classification on this whole operation is right through the roof. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
McKenna just shook his head and kept shaking it. His hands were balled into fists and they were trembling badly. His whole body was jittering, shuddering, his mind bugging out.
“Maybe I wanna transfer out, boss,” he said. “Maybe I don’t give a shit if they send me to your Resort and pick my brains clean. Maybe I just don’t give a shit. Because with what I saw in there, I don’t want to remember anymore.”
Cave pulled a pint of Jim Beam out from under the seat. He cracked it and drank long and hard off it. He handed it to McKenna who did the same, spilling a great deal down his chin.
Stein declined; whiskey wasn’t going to solve this mess.
He’d sat there quietly and listened to Cave and McKenna go at it and he hadn’t said a thing. Now he changed that.
“Sir,” he said, quietly, respectfully. “We had a right to know about what we were up against. We didn’t need to know everything, just the basics. It’s a soldier’s right, I think. I mean, if I was still in the Army and we dropped in to snatch some ratbag terrorist, then we’d have the right to know if said ratbag had two bodyguards with AKs in the room with him. Not telling us that could compromise the entire mission.” He let that sink in for a few seconds. “And you not telling us just what kind of shit we were wading into compromises this mi
ssion. Do you see that?”
Cave exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Yes, I see that,” he said. “And if it was up to me, you would have known. But the Old Man calls the shots.”
“It’s bullshit, sir.”
“I know it is.”
Stein sighed. “Maybe McKenna’s right. Maybe we should get out.”
“That’s your choice.”
Cave started up the van and let both of them think it over.
He drove slowly, heading out of East Chicago and getting back on the freeway. He did not speak and neither did the others. All the way back across the Illinois state line and into Chi, they did not speak. Cave let the silence lay so his men could sort it out in their own brains. Once at the Operations Center down by the river, they would have to make a choice. He dearly hoped it was the right one. They apparently didn’t comprehend the gravity of this whole thing. All across the country, there were other teams doing what they were doing. For once it wasn’t blind killing. For once what they were doing had a reason beyond politics. Beyond security leaks. This time they were attempting to protect the entire country.
When they got back to the warehouse, they would have to be sterilized, all three of them. They had come into close proximity with the nasty end result of what had once been called Project BioGen. Their clothing would have to be burned. They would have to be showered and scrubbed with special chemical soaps that would kill any egg casings they may have come into contact with.
The thought of one of those things growing in his belly made Cave break out in an icy sweat.
“Make the right decision, boys,” he said as he drove up 94 into the depths of the city, purposely not looking at either of them. “Because if you don’t... God help you.”
9:29 P.M.
About the time the white van pulled away, Shawna made her move.
An awful knot in her guts, she crawled across the side yard of the house and made it to the alley. Luckily, there were no dogs around. Coming face to face with somebody’s Doberman would have been bad... but not as bad as coming face to face with the men across the street.
